Network servers and other host computers may use different types of peripheral storage devices having different capacities, access times, and other operating characteristics suitable for various applications. Enterprise and data center solutions may employ multiple complementary data storage devices to achieve desired data availability, reliability, security, long-term accessibility, and cost effectiveness, among other considerations. Many networks use an automated schedule to archive data for long-term storage. Long-term storage devices may be implemented using a wide variety of storage technologies including magnetic and optical disk drives, solid-state drives, tape drives, or other types of storage devices. However, compromises among performance, capacity, and cost are often required. Tape drives continue to provide cost-effective, reliable, and energy efficient long-term data storage, particularly for high-volume backups, long-life archives, disaster recovery/business continuity, compliance, and various other applications that include inactive data.
Various applications require tape-based write-once, read-many (WORM) storage solutions. Once information is written to tape, additional information can be added or read as often as needed but can never be changed, modified, or deleted. A number of strategies have been used to identify or designate a particular magnetic tape cartridge or cassette as a WORM or read-only cartridge. For example, many magnetic tape cartridges include on-board memory, such as an RFID chip, that may include information designating the cartridge as WORM or read-only media. In addition, cartridges may have a movable switch or slider, a removable tab, a permanent ridge or dimple, etc. that may designate the cartridge as a WORM or read-only cartridge when appropriately positioned, removed, detected, etc. Furthermore, information stored on the tape at a specific location, such as in a media information record/region (MIR) or other location at or near the beginning-of-tape (BOT) or end-of-tape (EOT), for example, may be used to designate the cartridge as a WORM or read-only cartridge. These strategies for designating the media as WORM or read-only apply to the entire cartridge. While suitable for many applications, these strategies may become less desirable as tape storage densities continue to increase.
While various error correction techniques may be used to reduce or eliminate data errors, deterioration or damage to the physical tape media, for example, may result in one or more regions being unreadable or exceeding an acceptable error rate. This typically results in retiring the cartridge, i.e. no additional data can be written to any remaining regions of the tape. This may result in a significant loss of storage capacity for any such cartridge particularly as storage densities continue to increase.